Towards the Implied Player

Transcript, Bielefeld (Studies of Digital Media Culture), 2018

My aim in this book is to scrutinise the video game dystopia as a genre and to analyse the player’s aesthetic response to its nightmarish gameworlds. I am thereby arguing the video game dystopia describes a new strategic enterprise of the utopian philosophy. By sending players on a journey through hell but retaining a hopeful (utopian) core, it involves them in a playful trial action (or test run) in which they may test, track, and explore in detail an estranged gameworld and an alternative societal model through imaginative and ergodic means. This venture into the fictional reality of dystopia shows potential to warn players about negative trends within empirical reality and to explore emancipatory routes that may transform the gameworld—and, in the long run, their empirical surroundings. To describe this aesthetic response to playing dystopia (and the resulting ethical incentive to gradually change the world), I analyse the tripartite dialectic between empirical player, dystopian game, and culture (empirical world). Thereby, I am heavily influenced by theories of aesthetic response form representational art and literature (specifically Kendell Walton’s and Wolfgang Iser’s) and make abundant use of the concept of the implied player. This conceptual player is described in a non-personified way as the affordance and appeal structure of a game (and as a system of perspectives that constitute the game) that involves the empirical player in a creative negotiation of its bounds through play. The benefits of such a study are first of all the establishment of a framework to categorise and describe the video game dystopia as a genre—the results of which are of additional importance to utopian studies in a transmedial environment. Moreover, by describing the act of playing dystopia from a phenomenological point of view, which is nonetheless anchored in structuralism and narratology, the book expands its horizon to create a coherent theory of aesthetic response for video game narratives. Such deliberations involve a discussion of fictionality, which I will describe as upholding a specific, aggravated relation (referentiality) between the fictional and empirical world, and the experience of meaning in games. As such, I regard video games as multi-faceted phenomena and as hybrids between many things, the predominant form of which intermingles the qualities of traditional games and (participatory) narratives to involve the player in diverse ways. This conception of games and play construes the meaning-making process as an interaction between different elements (culture, player, game), while rejecting linear approaches to it.

2005

Presently, academic criticism of games approaches them either as vehicles for the expression of narrative, or as ‘ludic’ experiences where any aspects of traditional narratives are purely incidental to playing the game itself. Drawing on current critical work on videogames, theories of immersion, varying perspectives on narrative in games and on what games are, I argue that narrative theory is insufficient to deal with gaming. The interest of this thesis lies in the way that games enable narratives which are different in kind from narratives in other media, and in what gaming may have to teach us about more traditional forms of narrative. I use elements of actor-network theory and cybernetic studies in two case studies, Planescape: Torment and System Shock 2, to explain how narratives function in games through the ‘mechanical constitution’ of the subject or agent of the game. I argue that computer games achieve a different affect than other media by establishing a different relationship with their users through the mechanical constitution of a hybrid identity. Because of this different affect, games enable narratives which cannot be duplicated in other media without severe alteration to suit those media. The recombinant logic found in the hybrid causes the loss of the subjective element as a hybrid is created, hence narrative-theory cannot be usefully applied to games. I offer an alternative approach to narrative-theory, called the amniotic sac, which consolidates previous critical theories of the experience of gaming. In linking the immersive amniotic sac to previous studies of affect, such as those found in Reader-Response theory, I suggest that games are entering a post-narrativist space where affect replaces narrative in relevance.

"In highlighting the apparatus as the keystone for the magic circle of video gaming, we displace players—the subject of ludology—and “text”—the subject of narratology. This is not to deny the importance of players’ agency or the meanings of texts in video gaming; rather it is to reconsider these with regard to the screening of player from played inherent in the gaming apparatus. To better understand the situation of homo ludens in these more mediated play spaces, we turn to Jacques Lacan’s account of “split” subjectivity and retread it by explaining how it may well explain the operation of a magic circle spanning three dimensions of screen-play: rules (Symbolic dimension), representations (Imaginary dimension), and wares (Real dimension). In the end, we come around to the other space of Huizinga’s theory—the connections with the non-game world—to show that the value of video game play is also found beyond the apparatus, that the experience and enjoyment of video games are affected in part by social reality and, in turn, social reality is being affected by the experience and enjoyment of video games. Arriving at this point by first theorizing the video game apparatus, however, highlights matters of video game design more so than issues of audience or textual analysis. To illustrate this perspective, we conclude by defining three ways to analyze video games in terms of “realism,” proposing three types of video game realism: representational, simulative, and inverse. "

My aim is to provide clarity about the nature of the videogame as a meaning generating system, while I consider imagination a central concept. I approach videogames as a common part of culture, that can be looked at as a signification system, just like other common cultural products like magazines, art, tv-shows, newspapers, films, books, ads, fashion, design, et cetera. I have examined the artistic and aesthetic nature of games: could imagination in a game experience be comparable to our perception of art and literature? Grounded on a distinction between first and second order representation I have scrutinized the meaning generating capacity of game stories. First order representation is the concrete representation of (narrative) occurrences, while second order representation concerns involvement with a consciousness, with a perspective on the meaning-making proces related to those occurrences. My hypothesis is that processes of signification in videogames are similar to those in literature and film, but that these signification processes betray a different nature, producing different effects - to a large extend induced by the gamers prosuming mental ánd physical input.

Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies, 2019

In this paper, I am looking for the common ground to judge video game's formal qualities, such as its interface, the rule system and game goals, which would include and explain both intentionally and unintentionally subversive games labeled as 'bad' and 'not games'. I start with two cases of games that subvert expectations to the degree when players actively refuse to recognize them as games. Such games have inspired a variety of research and critique, but there is surprisingly little agreement on what makes them "bad" or subversive, as opposed to typical genre-conforming violent games, which are supposed to be subversive or "bad" but rarely produce the same disruptive experience. Relying on existing analysis of subversive and violent games, I apply user-centered, goal-oriented approaches of UX design (Norman, 1998; Cooper, 2007) to games and complement this framework with a new category, 'phantom affordances': perceived formal properties of a game that actively afford an action but do not deliver the expected outcome. This category can be productively applied to describe and design subversions in games.

Paratextualizing Games, 2021

Proceedings of the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination, 2023

The space in videogames is not a visual extension of conventional narrative structures, as in traditional media, but it becomes a tool to organize the tale. The possibility of exploring space and acting on it makes the videogame the closest medium to the embodied experience of a story. This feature attributes a central role to the spatial representation that help the player in the construction of meanings which are necessary to understand the narration. The spatial suggestions become a formal and structural code of visual signs, able to emphasize tones and atmospheres and/or to express emotional valances. Starting from these considerations, the research aims to analyze the relationships between visual representation and narrative language in videogames. The survey methodology includes a comparative analysis of videogame spaces, starting from the main types of stories: realistic, verisimilar and unrealistic. This distinction allows to identify three macrogroups of spatial representations. The empathetic/anempathetic spaces reproduce perceptions similar to those existing in a physical space. The utopian/dystopian spaces propose perceptions that do not coincide with existing reality but that are potentially realizable in certain space-time conditions. The impossible/elsewhere spaces, finally, offer perceptions that not only do not coincide with reality, but that are also impractical in the physical world. This research underlines how the scientific area of representation can contribute significantly to the study of videogame, understood as a narrative form in which the drawing of the space is applied as an irreplaceable modality for the construction of a visual code of thought.

2014

Galley, for their feedback throughout the thesis process and their unwavering support throughout my time at Syracuse University. Last but not least I want to thank my mother Denise Stenger and partner Jezreel Clausell. Without the years of unconditional love and encouragement they've given me I could never be where I am today.. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction and Theoretical Framework……………………………..….1 Chapter 2 'Clementine Will Remember That': Immersive Witnessing in Telltale's The Walking Dead ……………………………………….…29 Chapter 3 "A Story you Play to Change the World": True Immersive Witnessing in Half the Sky Movement ……………….……………….….51 Chapter 4 Implications and Conclusion………..……………..……………………..76 Works Cited……………………………………………………………....87 Vita………………………………………………………………………..95 1 CHAPTER 1 5 in-game events and experiences for players. Ultimately, this could influence the future use of games' persuasive capacities. Contemporizing rhetorical approaches to form, Kenneth Burke (1951) describes the "difference between the 'old rhetoric' and the 'new'" as a divergence from focusing on "deliberate design" and a move toward "'identification,' which can include a partially unconscious factor in appeal" (p. 203). By defining "unconscious factors" as integral to persuasion, Burke troubles the previously taken-for-granted concept of audience. He places increased responsibility for interpretation into the hands of the audience, rather than creators of texts. This is evidenced in Burke's (1968) definition of form as "the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite" (p. 31). This "appetite" suggests expectations and longings in the mind of readers of texts. Burke extends form beyond oratory and finds it in literary texts: "Form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of expectations" (p. 217). These expectations, however, cannot be present without some previous interaction with the form. Thus, the audience must be able to connect the experience presented in the form to something they already have experience with for it to be appealing and make sense. By Burke's description, audiences interpret the content of messages by calculating how its form fits into knowledge and experiences they already have. Burke considered form foundational to identification and argued that literary form could function as "equipment for living" (p. 293). This "equipment for living" can be understood as the lessons or advice audiences draw from fictional narratives through means of identifying the similarities between their own life experiences and the situations and ideas presented in the form. Considerations of form shifted again in the late 20 th and early 21 st century as Barry